[Book review] Richard Wagner’s Essays on Conducting : a new translation with critical commentary. Chris Walton

Abstract

Chris Walton’s new English translation of Wagner’s conducting essays is an impressive effort and a welcome contribution not only to Wagner scholarship but to the history of musical performance. Walton shows in detail something that has long been supposed but rarely examined: Wagner’s singular role in establishing a tradition of modern orchestral conducting and performance. The study is divided into two main parts. Following a brief Introduction (pp. 1–6), Part 1 consists of Walton’s annotated translation of four prose texts by Wagner on conducting, each with its own preface. The four texts are: extracts from ‘Reminiscences of Spontini’ (pp. 9–14); ‘Report on the Performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Dresden in 1846’ (pp. 15–22); and the lengthy and influential essays ‘About Conducting’ (pp. 23–108) and ‘On Performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’ (pp. 109–42). Part 2, almost equal in size to Part 1, comprises Walton’s own extensive essay (‘Richard Wagner and the Art of Conducting’, pp. 145–273), organized around a wide range of topics and contexts, including iconography, the influence of Berlioz, anti-Semitism, tempo modification, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. The book contains an extensive bibliography and index, as well as numerous illustrations and musical examples, in some cases expanded and reordered from Wagner’s original.